Thousands of Vermonters marched through downtown Burlington to the waterfront to participate in the Burlington Pride Festival and Parade last weekend. Dozens of local vendors, food trucks, and organizations lined Waterfront Park next to a large stage, where speakers and musical acts performed through the afternoon. This longstanding event is hosted each year by the Pride Center of Vermont.
“We’ve been shifting a little bit every year, trying to put even more of a focus on local businesses as vendors and moving Pride back toward its roots of being community-based and liberation focused, and not so corporate,” said Phoebe Zorn, the Center’s executive director. She said almost all the vendors the Pride Center contracted for the festival are queer owned. She estimated a similar turnout this year compared to last, roughly 3,000 people.
A sudden and mercifully brief rain shower appeared Sunday after the parade had concluded, which sent some festival attendees scrambling under vendor tents. However, the real surprise of this year’s Pride dropped several days earlier.
On Wednesday of last week, Seven Days published an article covering the grievances of former Pride Center board members in painstaking detail. An event that for 41 years has signaled inclusion and belonging in Burlington had its hosting organization, according to the headline, “Roiled by Allegations of Antisemitism.”
Those board members resigned in March, the culmination of a years-long series of issues between the Center’s board and staff, covering organizational culture, internal communications, and interpersonal behavior. According to staff members, consultants brought in to facilitate dialogue and resolution found repeated harmful behavior on the part of several board members and an unwillingness to genuinely engage in the process.
“Especially as a new executive director who was formerly part of the staff, I felt the more important thing was supporting and standing with my staff,” Zorn said. “And you know, they really experienced a lot of harm from certain folks, and I had to use my new power to take care of the staff and keep the organization running.”
Despite the myriad of factors at play, Seven Days’ primary focus was a statement in which the Pride Center called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, published last year after the shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington and just weeks after Zorn was appointed to the role of executive director. Some board members took offense, with former board member Wendy Beinner asserting in her resignation email that “Pride Center is now anti-Jewish” as a result.
“I think [Center staff] are all very clear, including myself, that speaking out against genocide isn’t anti-semitic,” Zorn said.
The reason for Seven Days to bring up a months-old internal organizational issue, which by its own reporting had long since “died down,” was its own conjecture that the “dispute could flare up” during Pride events.
Fortunately, Pride went off, in the words of coverage elsewhere, “without a hitch.” The Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation and its member organizations were invited to lead this year’s parade, a sea of rainbow and Palestinian flags winding through Burlington’s streets to the waterfront. There were no reports of conflict or disturbances in the parade or at the festival.
Despite Beinner’s claim that Pride Center was “anti-Jewish,” the Jewish presence was large and unmistakable. Two local synagogues participated in the parade. Jewish members of the Center’s board and staff attended. Members of Jewish Voice for Peace spoke from the stage that afternoon, saying, “As American Jews, we know all too well the ways in which our identity, our heritage, and our safety have been weaponized to justify war crimes and atrocities against the Palestinian people. We also see the way queer safety is being weaponized to justify violence against the Palestinian people.”
Several activists interviewed noted that a common talking point for those in favor of Israel’s military assault on Gaza is that the Israeli state is more tolerant of queer people compared to its neighbors — an argument found multiple times in the Seven Days article. To that they replied that Israeli bombs are raining down on straight and queer Palestinians alike, and that a commitment to human rights and self-determination should extend to all peoples, without first checking whether they have correct opinions.
Members of the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation wrote yesterday, “far from freeing queer Palestinians from oppression, Israel is massacring them and decimating their previously vibrant movement for queer liberation.” This fits within a longer, well-documented history of Israeli and U.S. governments using economic and military intervention to prop up reactionary powers in the region.
“I think the Pride Center was courageous to put out the statement and to invite us to this parade,” said Wafic Faour of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine. “We are proud of them. We stand with their struggle. We have a common struggle, together with the Pride Center, based on human rights.”
“Nobody likes to get bad press, but we feel that bad press for standing up for values we believe in isn’t really bad press,” said Zorn.
The figurative and literal linking of arms between queer liberation and Palestinian liberation seen on Sunday is just the latest in a decades-long history of cross-movement cooperation and mutual support.
Migrant Justice was one of the organizations participating in the parade, their presence marked by colorful cardboard butterflies, a symbol of the immigrant rights movement. Migrant Justice is in the middle of a years-long campaign to get Hannaford grocery stores to join the Milk with Dignity Program, which would result in higher wages and better conditions for dairy workers.
Hannaford employees marched as a group in the parade, but the corporation itself, headquartered in Maine, was not an official sponsor or participant. In 2022, the Vermont Pride Center declined Hannaford’s sponsorship, along with the $18,000 donation that would have accompanied it, out of solidarity with Migrant Justice. That year, the Burlington Pride Parade was led by Migrant Justice activists, dairy workers, and supporters, with cardboard butterflies flapping under the late summer sun.
Patrick is a writer and organizer based in northern Vermont. He is on the editorial collective for The Rake Vermont.
